What Does Energy Policy Mean in the United States? Where do we get the facts?
This diary and those to follow are my personal attempt to step back and look at what we know about the energy situation in the U.S. and how well we know it. This is an area where effective government based on real facts about the the natural world, will make a difference. Not only direct government action, but healthy private markets will be needed, yet as there are many natural limits of competition, good policy by government is needed to to have good markets. Even if we are extremely lucky and get 25% good government, if it is based on real understanding, the U.S. may muddle through. I want to understand these issues and have some way to measure whether government policies are good, so I am using these diaries as a record of a swim through the murky waters of power. Thanks to Darksyde's diaries to make me think that I might as well do this in the open here.
Energy policy will be one of the dominant themes in the Obama administration both directly and indirectly.
The President has already said:
We will put Americans to work in new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced... and developing the new energy technologies that will lead to even more jobs, more savings, and a cleaner, safer planet in the bargain.
Investment in infrastructure like better distribution methods such as the smart grid which
will save us money, protect our power sources from blackout or attack, and deliver clean, alternative forms of energy to every corner of our nation. (1)
A lot of money from the stimulus package will be spent on things energy related. Greenhouse gas reduction and climate mitigation, wait, don't forget energy independence. Terms and topics abound: Conservation, Smart grids, Wind, Solar, Nuclear, Clean Coal, Biofuels, Cellulosic Ethanol, New kinds of nuclear generation and on and on. This is going to take quite some number of diaries and some time to get my head around.
Reading and listening to the current news media has left me wondering, confused, and finally disgusted. The coverage has been lacking so much that I am not sure whether CNN dumping their science reporters is bad. I am sure they are much better reporters than I, but they seem to have been in an impossible situation, with hard editorial constraints. The topics and method of coverage are scattershot at every level. Then we have the perhaps otherwise sane people saying “drill baby drill” as if the Bush administration would have put any roadblocks in the way of any economically viable or sizable oil drilling locations in the past years. There has been little analysis by the news media about errors in figures about relative importance of different energy sources or any kind of real attempt to keep a continuing overview. People say there are constraints on papers and media but if the coverage of energy issues was at the resource and quality level of football or baseball reporting, I wouldn't be writing this. Anyway, I am diving in with research slightly (but not much) more deep than the “Fermi” back of the envelope, level. (2)
When someone says U.S. energy policy what does that mean? To me it means Policy that addresses these:
- Assuring Adequate Energy Supplies of all major types.
- Reducing Greenhouse gas emission from energy.
- Reducing in the amount of Petroleum and Natural gas imported.
- Increasing the resiliency or toughness of our energy supply and distribution network.
- Minimizing the ecological and human impact of the energy system.
These items are enough to measure against. We ought to be able to take policies and say if they are helping one or the other of these items. Some policies will help and hurt several at the same time. Lets look a little at each:
First of all I want lights, I want to be able to drive around, I want to be able to fly to visit relatives, I want to be warm in winter and cool in summer. I want to have a job and have others have jobs that actually make things, learn things, fix things. These all need energy – electrical, heating and cooling, transportation, industrial process. We have to have enough and more to do these things. The next diary will look at the amount we need. Conservation, or really, increasing efficiency, is the biggest key, but only goes so far. We need energy sources that are big enough and meet the other four criteria.
Second, lets actually take our best estimates for what we need to do to slow Greenhouse gas emissions. R.K. Pauchari, the chief of the International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC says this:
We (in the IPCC) have estimated that to stabilize global temperature increases at just 2 to 2.4 degrees Celsius we have only about seven (7) years to turn around global emissions of greenhouse gases like Carbon Dioxide. By 2015 they'll have to peak, by 2020 we'll need to put in place a 25 to 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. (3)
Personally that sounds unlikely to happen so we better be also looking at mitigation. It will take big changes and has large policy implications. Small measures aren't going to cut it.
Third, Reducing petroleum and Natural gas imports to the U.S. does at least three important things, it reduces the outflow of capital, reduces the pressure on prices for developing countries, and expands the flexibility in U.S. Policy by reducing the impact of pressure that things like oil supply disruption or it's threat puts on U.S. Government action.
Fourth, and this is also implicit in number three, our energy supply and distribution should be tough enough to take natural disasters, human induced errors of judgement, and changes to inputs, and be relatively easy to repair. Energy sources with choke points like refinery capacity should be discouraged or fixed. Fragility in distribution due to short term profit taking should be acted against.
Fifth, we can't just look at greenhouse gasses, but also at the impact on human lives, wildlife like plants and birds, polluted lands and rivers, and cost of commodities. These need to be balanced against power produced. I think by using these five areas to measure one can rack and stack energy alternatives and policies.
Electricity, transportation, heating and cooling, and industrial process use are the big energy targets in the United States. Any kind of policy reduces to this: Changing the mix of production, Altering distribution, or changing the amount or type of consumption. This could be due to economic activity, process changes, mandates and so on. In this sense Energy Policy is “hard” in a way that most other issues aren't. We can and ought to have real measures of success and real goals for legislation in this area. Percentage of production increases for different types of things like wind, percent reductions in use for conservation measures. These numbers get tossed around all over, but often don't make sense when added up. Let's change that!
I was going to jump right in to the big picture of energy use but when I started digging in, I realized that the first thing to look at is the current data, its limits and how it is presented. There are innumerable sources of excellent information. The Federal Government itself spends millions of dollars on this, and has its own organization: The Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, which has hundreds of presentations available at their www.eia.doe.gov website. They have numbers to answer a lot of questions already, but this data raises questions. Look at the Annual Energy Outlook 2009 preliminary model and you will see an Annual Reference Case of energy use until the year 2030. I am guessing that there must have been a legislative mandate as it has been done for a while and has open assumptions going in. When I first set eyes on this I was shocked at how off it seemed to be. Holy cow, we spend money producing this? As I calmed down and realized what a “reference case” means, this thing becomes useful. It is still quite misleading in the sense that anybody looking at the world could see that it would not be any kind of real expectation. The assumptions of small perturbations to life as usual generally are good things, but not with the years ahead, and that is ignoring economic activity just looking at reserves, and global usage. A real active model with the knobs and assumptions visible might be a better way to present this information.
Well with this wealth of EIA data, there is one more question that must be raised. Can we trust it? How accurate are the numbers. I can find no easily accessible data on this, but will plough forward on the assumption that it is close enough. I have applied some back of the envelope calculations to things and nothing so far has been too wacky. There names are out there to contact if necessary. The Preliminary report was issued in December and I wonder what the final report will look like given new administration and new DOE chief? I always feel like the Gary Sinise character in the Apollo 13 movie, when told “we're 4 or 5 amps short” snaps back, well is it 4 or 5? A classic engineering response. A percent here or there on these numbers may make quite a policy difference in the end, so it will be good to keep this in mind as we go along.
Next Up, How big is big, what is our current consumption and what would it mean to do things like implement 25% reductions? Then, moving forward, a look at energy sources starting with the most rapidly growing, and what kind of policies will push them.
Notes
(1) Obama Policy speech 9-Jan-2009
(2) Enrico Fermi the physicist would pose problems and calculate answers off the cuff by making obvious assumptions. The classic case being: How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? See Wikipedia's Fermi Problem Entry.
(3) Science News 3-Jan-2009 page 32